To review Best Playwriting Book Ever, I broke the first rule of playwright club. In his prologue, Roger Hall advises: “To get the best out of this book, write a play (or as much as you can of one) before you read it.” I have never written a play, though I have been watching and performing plays on various stages for almost as long as people have been flocking to Hall’s plays, since his break-out hit, Glide Time (1976). He has now written 50 plays, alongside film scripts and TV series, so he has certainly earned the right to stake his claim in the title of this book. Ticket sales from Hall’s plays have helped fund so many of our theatres, and Hall himself has managed the still rare local feat of making a living as a playwright. He has told that story entertainingly in his autobiography, Bums on Seats (1998).

Vivienne Plumb recalls her own private Iowa My room was a white square with a smoke alarm on the ceiling and an extra-large bed which often had to serve as a second table, covered with copies of The New York…

Red Light Means Stop: Six Super Solos from Aotearoa NZ ed Vivienne Plumb The Women’s Play Press, $27.95, ISBN 0958231001 Readers of this potent volume of mostly solo plays may engage with them as literature, as texts “auditioning” for production,…

The Waiting Room You are the space I have to go to before teeth, before tickets, before examination, and lying on the funny little bed, before the train, the plane, the exam, the interview, the sudden realisation, the notification,…

Like You, Really Kate Flannery, Penguin Books, $24.95 The Wife Who Spoke Japanese in Her Sleep Vivienne Plumb, Otago University Press, $24.95 Best Friends Elspeth Sandys, David Ling, $19.95 All the Tenderness Left in the World Stephanie Johnson, Otago University…